San Francisco Silent Film Festival: 2025

As the Castro Theater is still closed for renovations, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival took place this year at the Orinda Theater. This is a much better choice than last year's location, the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, which is fine if a bit generic inside as a venue but too difficult to reach via public transportation & too isolated: the Festival tried to make up for that with some food trucks, but in general it was an uphill battle out there. I ended up not seeing many films (in fact, only one) because anything that was first or last on the schedule just didn't work out transit-time-wise for me. The Orinda Theater, by contrast, is easily accessible via BART (& has plenty of parking, if that's your thing) & surrounded by all kinds of restaurants (even more so than the Castro Theater, actually), as well as being large &, as an Art Deco exemplar, close to period appropriate. Even so, I only made it to a few programs this year, for a number of reasons (none having to do with the quality of the films),. This is what I saw:

The Wreck of the Hesperus

1927; directed by Elmer Clifton

This recently rediscovered & restored film is based on a poem by Longfellow about young lovers separated by her father, a ship's captain who bears a romantic grudge against the young man's uncle, but that drama is topped by the final storm at sea & the wreck of the captain's vessel. It's quite beautiful to look at & very well cast. I was particularly impressed with Ethel Wales as the captain's sister, assigned by him with looking after his stubbornly lovelorn daughter; it's a very small role, but you immediately see that she is not the sort of moony spinster who is going to sympathize with young love. Nor is she a dragon guarding the treasure, or a fussy old maid; she's just a sort of fretful & annoyed person who seems to wish everyone would just behave, or at least leave her alone, though she does of course her duty. 

The film was intended as a step towards stardom for the young romantic leads, Virginia Bradford & Frank Marion, though, according to the SFSFF's always richly detailed (& free!) program book, neither one took off with the public. I found this quite surprising, as both are very appealing. She is, not surprisingly, a beauty, with long dark curls & a demeanor earthy enough to make her convincing as the daughter of a flinty New England sea captain but with a touch enough of the fey so that she seems a bit out of the ordinary. He, too, is a curly-haired beauty, & as the movie was illustrated in both brochure & program book with a dreamy close-up of him, I'm apparently not the only one who thought so. The close-up comes from his first scene, when he is found adrift on the sea, the only survivor of a shipwreck (not the one of the title); once he recovers, we find that he has an engaging presence & a killer smile, so once again I am left befuddled by the taste or lack of it of the American public.

The storm & shipwreck scenes are quite spectacular, & though you can try to parse which shots are done with models, which with sets, & which with who knows what, it's all cut together seamlessly & with verve, so that you get caught up in the events rather than the technique, & it's all so much more convincing & more beautiful to look at than the computer-generated fakery, with its false pixel sheen, that we get these days. Our young hero, in a stylish & visually helpful ruffled white shirt (which helps him stand out against the dark lashing waves, the ruffles echoing both the waves & his curls) rushes towards the sinking ship to save his beloved, who is tied to the mast. It's an exciting & satisfying film. It was new to me (I'd never even heard of it), so I was very glad to have seen it. If it's ever released, I'd buy a copy.

KoKo!

a series of Fleischer Cartoons: Jumping Beans (1922), It's the Cats (1926), KoKo at the Circus (1926), KoKo in 1999 (1927), KoKo's Kane (1927), KoKo's Klock (1927), KoKo's Kink (1928), KoKo's Earth Control (1928)

The early Fleischer Brother cartoons are always delights of homegrown surrealism. This batch, only a few of which I'd seen before, features KoKo, the Out of the Inkwell clown maybe best remembered now as an occasional sidekick of the inimitable Betty Boop, a star of later Fleischer cartoons. It's nice to see him in his early days as a headliner. I read somewhere long ago that the Fleischer Brothers used to say, "If it could really happen, it's not animation" & that's a guiding principle here, as what's going on up on the screen stretches & shapes & contorts & changes from scene to scene, hung on the thinnest of storylines. That's a good thing. I also love the strongly blocked black-against-white designs of the cartoons. I'm going to continue my above dismissal of contemporary computer-generated films by contrasting these evergreen shorts with today's animation, most of which seems to be filmed on location in the Uncanny Valley. I'm not a big fan of the Pixar films (the only one I've really loved is Luca, about the boys who are sea serpents, though in fairness I will also admit I have not seen a lot of the more highly regarded Pixar films), & a lot of that is their look: they labor to make things look "realistic", but if it's that important to you to get hair so accurate you'd think it's real, why not just film real hair? Anyway this was a delightful set.

Song

1928; directed by Richard Eichberg

In a complete change of mood & aesthetic, the KoKo shorts were followed by Song (original title: Die Liebe eines armen Menschenkindes, which is, according to Google Translate, The Love of a Poor Child). This was Anna May Wong's first European film, when she felt her American film career was stalled & mired in stereotypical secondary roles. Earlier this year I read an excellent book on Wong (Daughter of the Dragon by Yunte Huang) so I couldn't remember if I'd actually seen this film or only read a description of it. It turns out I had not seen it. I gather it's sometimes spoken of a bit dismissively but I thought it was extremely good. Wong is, as most people know by now, just luminous, & subtle & convincing in her portrayal of a lonely young woman who falls in love with a circus performer, a knife thrower, (Heinrich George) who rescues her from an attempted rape by two men on the beach. He is not interested in her, though, as he is smitten with his former lover, a dancer (Mary Kid) who thought he had died & who has moved on anyway (she's an appealing character, not shown as bad or scheming or bitchy: just someone who's over someone who isn't over her). As is often the case, plot summaries make the film sound thinner & more melodramatic than it is; as portrayed by the actors & staged by the director, it's a moving portrait of a roundelay of misguided loves. Wong is naturally the big draw these days, & the theater was quite full for this one, but it has many good points in addition to its star.

Kohlhiesel's Daughters

1920; directed by Ernst Lubitsch

This is one of Lubitsch's early German films, though unlike many of those it's not an historical epic but a comedy, based (very loosely) on The Taming of the Shrew. It was one of his biggest hits in Germany but is little known here, apparently not even receiving a theatrical release at the time (which was too close to the end of World War I, when the boycott of German films continued in the USA). Even now, when Lubitsch is a presiding deity of Sophisticated Cinema, & many (most?) of his early films are easily available, this one isn't (Kino, where art thou?). Not surprisingly, it's a lot of fun. It's set in the Bavarian mountains & involves two sisters (both played by Henny Porten), the elder a foul-tempered frump & the younger a prettier & more conventional sweetie. As in Shrew, the father insists the elder sister must be married (& taken off his hands) before the younger one can choose among her suitors. Emil Jannings is the sort-of Petruchio, who ends up with the elder sister. It's all very good-humored; you never feel that the elder sister is being vilified or mocked, & her rampages are more comical than anything else. Porten gets laughs as the younger sister as well, which is more of a challenge than with the over-the-top older sister. As I said, lots of fun, &, again, as with all these movies, if it's released, I'd buy a copy.

The Song of the Scarlet Flower

1919; directed by Mauritz Stiller

Lars Hanson stars in this Swedish film, based on a 1905 Finnish novel (Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta by Johannes Linnankoski), which was popular enough to be filmed several times after this initial version. It's the tale of the headstrong son of wealthy farmers, who ends up leaving his family home in anger & working in a logging camp, before eventually maturing & marrying the proud daughter of another wealthy landowner. It's maybe less tidy than this makes it sound, as she falls for him, & her father opposes him, without knowing his privileged background, which he has kept from them; before he ends up in this class-appropriate coupling, we see the tragic effect he's had on a lower-class serving girl on his parents' farm. What most viewers are going to carry away, though, is the memory of his log-rolling towards dangerous river rapids, a bit of bravado made all the more striking (to continue a leitmotif of this post) because it's not faked with computer imaging as it would be nowadays. It's an emotionally satisfying film, full of beautiful vistas, though maybe a little more conventional than I was hoping for. A friend of mine thought that Hanson occasionally overdid the stalwart manliness, but I thought that was just who the character was, & it provided an interesting contrast with some of Hanson's more tortured roles (The Saga of Gösta Berling, The Scarlet Letter, & let's not forget his anguish in Flesh & the Devil). Again, I'd buy a release!

The next festival will be back at the Castro Theater, from 6 to 10 May 2026. Before that, there will be a special Festival screening at the Castro on 22 March of Clara Bow in It, with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. See you there!

SF Silent Film Festival: A Day of Silents

Continuing a wrap-up of last year with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's A Day of Silents:

The annual Day of Silents was held at the period-appropriate, gloriously ornate Castro Theater, & as in a few weeks the venue is being shut down for about a year & a half by its new owners in order to undertake extensive renovations (possibly, it has been suggested by many, ruinations), there was a nostalgic feeling in the air (though you will have one more chance to experience the Castro as a purely cinematic palace when the Festival presents Dreyer's Vampyr, with their signature live musical accompaniment, on 12 January).

The nostalgia was for the beloved & historic venue; there is surprisingly little nostalgia involved in seeing the films, some of which are well past the century mark in age. Perhaps nostalgia is limited to the remembered creations & moments from one's youth, & there can be few people still around who experienced silent film in its original moment. The six programs, which as usual with the Festival were wide-ranging & varied, could be seen & appreciated directly as art.

The first program, Of Mice & Men (& Cats & Clowns), with musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker & Nicholas White, was all animation, covering Émile Cohl's 1908 Fantasmagorie to Pat Sullivan's 1928 Felix the Cat in Sure-Locked Homes. Obviously Felix is the Cat referenced in the title; the clown is the Fleischer Brothers' Koko, who made an Out of the Inkwell appearance in A Trip to Mars & Vacation, both from 1924. I guess Koko was a star until he turned into a sidekick in the early sound era for the incandescent Betty Boop. Anyway, the films on the program contained an amazing level of technical innovation (mixing animation & live action, right from the start!), surreal wit, filmic cleverness, & impressive amounts of sheer though submerged labor (some of the earliest cartoons, including Winsor McKay's disturbing How a Mosquito Operates from 1912, required the artist to produce thousands of individual drawings). The designs tend to be much simpler than in the richly drawn cartoons of the 1930s. These cartoons are not the worse for that; there is a graphic boldness to them that looks clean & classic. I much prefer it to the Uncanny Valley of today's computer-produced, realism-driven works.

The second program was Ernst Lubitsch's The Wildcat from 1921, starring Pola Negri, with musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. I thought before going in that I had seen this film, but afterwards I was pretty sure I had not, as I can't imagine forgetting such a wild & fanciful foray. The set design alone (Ernst Stern & Max Gronau), with its swirling fortress in the snowy Bavarian Alps, is something that would stick in the memory. I loved the way many shots were framed so that we're mostly seeing things under arches or through circles or in some other eccentric configuration. Negri as the powerful daughter of the Chief of the mountain brigands assailing the fortress is as expected a vital & appealing force. Even if I had seen the movie before, I would would be happy to see it again: it's full of wild moments & surprises.

Next up was The Eagle from 1925, directed by Clarence Brown & starring Rudolph Valentino & Vilma Banky, with musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker. This was a lovely print & an excellent showcase for Valentino, who displays not only his graceful almost feline sexual charm but also great skill at light-comedy moments. It's based on an unfinished story by Pushkin & involves a son (Valentino) who seeks revenge on the ignoble Nobleman who has cheated his father out of his country estate. There's also Louise Dresser as a delightfully lusty Catherine the Great (someone should put together a film series of the cinematic Catherines; there's Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress & Elisabeth Bergner in the Korda-produced Rise of Catherine the Great & I'm sure there are others). She, like the audience, is drawn to the handsome young soldier. He is resistant, possibly because he's already seen golden-haired Vilma Banky, but honestly . . . Catherine is certainly older than he is, but not by that much, & she's quite attractive, &, you know, why not? But the plot requires him to flee her attentions. The sets for this one were also quite striking; designed by William Cameron Menzies, they reminded me of his elegant work for the Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad. There are certainly striking dramatic moments, particularly when Valentino is undercover in the house of the evil Nobleman (who turns out to be the father of Vilma Banky), & some striking cinematic moments, including a famous tracking shot down a banquet table that brought applause from our audience. These things, & the appeal of the characters, more than made up for some loose ends in the plot (the family estate never really does seem returned & the father avenged, but otherwise there is a happy ending all around).

Fourth was Pavement Butterfly, a German/British collaboration from 1929, directed by Richard Eichberg & starring Anna May Wong, with musical accompaniment by the Sascha Jacobsen Ensemble. Wong is receiving some long overdue recognition, & the theater was packed for this one (a friend of mine who came only to this program told me he had some trouble finding a seat). The audience included some members of Wong's family (she was a California native). Butterfly in the title might lead you to expect a story along the lines of Puccini's great opera, but though there is a lover who moves on while she stays faithful, the story is complicated in other ways & she does not die at the end – my recollection of the translation of her farewell subtitle in the film is that it was "I don't belong with you", but the article in the program book gives it as "I don't belong to you", which is something different. (The original words are Ich gehöre nicht zu euch & Google Translate agrees with the program book.) The setting is the Parisian / Monte Carlo demimonde of artists & wealthy patrons. As you might expect from a late-period silent film from Germany, the photography is stunning & the whole film is gorgeous to look at (I believe the film has only recently been restored). Wong is a subtle performer & an incandescent presence.

Since I mentioned the program book, I should emphasize that the Festival always does a wonderful job with them. They are substantial publications, with interesting articles on the programs & many attractive photographs. & the Festival doesn't charge for them!

I left after Pavement Butterfly. That had been my plan all along, as the fifth program was Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! & the final program, a melodrama titled Forgotten Faces, started late enough so that I didn't want to stick around before the MUNI/BART return to the east bay. I had some regrets about skipping Faces. The Lloyd I have seen before & if you have any sort of feelings about heights, it is difficult to watch. The first time I saw it was at the Pacific Film Archive when I was a student at Berkeley. By the time the film ended I was drenched in sweat. The second time I saw it was during the pandemic, when I finally watched the boxed set of Lloyd films I had bought years before. & though I admired Lloyd's ingenuity, & the impressive physical feat represented by the film (done though he was missing a thumb & forefinger! & those shoes he's wearing – those are regular dress shoes, with no traction on the soles!), I decided I didn't need to see the movie again. Since this is its centennial year, it made sense to have it headline the festival, but . . . not for me. When I read in the program book that when Lloyd came across the actual "human fly" who inspired the film, his "heart was in [his] throat" & he had to keep looking away. I felt considerable relief, as I was starting to feel a bit candy-ass about my inability to watch the film. I like Lloyd (though I prefer Chaplin & Keaton), but I'll stick to something like The Kid Brother.